Most religious traditions incorporate myths,stories, and legends into their belief systems. Within any particular culture,the people often do not make a distinction between these three things, but many scholars prefer to view these as distinct analytical categories. Some view folklore as a broad category which includes stories, songs, oral histories, and prayers; myth is the genre of folklore that is concerned with sacred stories about cultural origins.
A number of scholars make a distinction between folklore, as exemplified by “folk tales” and “legends” and myths. Alice Marriott and Carol Rachlin, in their book American Indian Mythology, make a distinction between myth and folklore. Myth, they write, “applies to the actions and counteractions of supernatural beings” while legend involves “the recording of the deeds and doings of earthly heroes, whether or not they trod the ground with historic feet.” Thus, there are cultural or religious heroes or figures who may or may not have actually lived, but whose stories are told as though they actually happened. In other instances, the stories of culture heroes or religious figures may combine the deeds of several different people and present them as though they were the accomplishments of a single person.
The distinctions, if any, that people who use mythology make between stories, legends, and so on may be very different from the scholars who study, teach, and write about these things. In writing about Norse mythology, Neil Price, in an article in Medieval Archaeology, writes:
“Some of the stories concern semi-legendary figures, others related to the activities of gods and supernatural beings, while others still purport to describe historical events involving people who actually live. It is important to understand that Viking-Age people need not have seen any reason to separate these categories and may have viewed them as a seamless whole.”
In her chapter on myth and folklore in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion, Amy Gazin-Schwartz writes:
“Folklore and myth are meaningful within specific social context. Social groups ‘own’ the folklore, subscribe to the beliefs encoded in myths, and understand the traditions and practices that folklore encompasses. The social context may be limited to small groups: families, extended families, or small villages; or it may extend to entire nations.”
Amy Gazin-Schwartz also writes:
“Folklore is symbolic expression, and not necessarily meant to be taken literally. Origin myths are told in mythological language, and are symbolic and requiring interpretation. Myths reveal not facts about the past, so much as the significance of the past. We often cannot look to these stories for facts, but we can look to them for meaning.”
Many scholars have lamented the fact that in English myth has acquired an implication of being untrue, of being a story that has been somehow just “made up.” In his textbook Social Anthropology, Paul Bohannan writes:
“It is unfortunate that the word myth has, in English, accreted to itself, somewhere in the course of its historical development, the association of untruth.”
Myth often has its origin in historical reality which has been embellished to fit the metaphorical needs of the storyteller. In her book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, Karen Armstrong writes:
“The word myth has lost its force in modern times and tends to mean something that is not true, that never happened. But in the premodern world, mythology expressed a timeless rather than historical reality and provided a blueprint for action in the present.”
With regard to understanding myth and what it might tell us about the past, Paul Bohannan writes:
“The historical value of a myth must be judged by the same set of rigorous criteria as the historical value of a document—who is trying to prove what when he repeats a myth or writes a memoir? It will be found that all myth bears the stamp of truth—but it is a qualified truth, having perhaps nothing to do with history and but little to do with society.”
Paul Bohannan goes on to say:
“Every society, then, has myths about what it does not understand: about, if we may use the medieval term, its mysteries. Yet, the myths are kept nurtured by something more tangible: the recurrent events in which they are played out, with greater or lesser symbolic nicety.”
Mythology is tightly intertwined with the cultural context in which it originated. This includes language, material cultural, social organization, and religion. In their book Deciphering Ancient Minds: The Mystery of San Bushman Rock Art, David Lewis-Williams and Sam Challis write:
“Always, whatever approach we pursue, myth can be understood only in its own cultural setting, no matter what cross-cultural parallels we may be able to detect.”
Myths and legends have grown out of the storyteller’s art of making the past interesting and providing interesting lessons for the present and future. This is an art that is tied directly to the ability of language to create verbal images of the past, abstract ideas, and idealized places. In the days long before the internet, before television, and before books, storytellers could sit around the campfire and enthrall audiences with the stories which much later might be written down and even televised as an expression of religious beliefs.
Unlike written stories, which can become religious dogma, in the oral traditions, storytellers were relatively free to update the story to meet current needs. Among the Yanomamo, a Native American group living in South America’s Amazon Basin, Napoleon Chagnon, in his ethnography Yanomamö: The Fierce People, reports:
“Individuals can and do modify concepts, embellish them, improve on them, and, in general, use their imaginations when trafficking in myths or concepts of the soul and afterlife.”
In his book The Anthropology of Eastern Religions: Ideas, Organizations, and Constituencies, Murray Leaf writes:
“Tales of signs and wonders, supernatural interventions, magic, and miracles can be added to any story. They can be multiplied indefinitely and every religious tradition has versions of its main stories that are full of them, regardless of whether they are consistent with the core teachings or not.”
It is language, of course, which gives humans the ability to creatively time travel, to image both the past and future, and to think of and describe things, beings, and events which are only loosely inspired by the present. In her book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, Karen Armstrong writes:
“We have imagination, a faculty that enables us to think of something that is not immediately present, and that, when we first conceive it, has no objective existence. The imagination is the faculty that produced religion and mythology.”
It is the creative human imagination that brings supernatural beings—some of which are frightening demons and others are hero-saviors—into existence in the stories. Anthropologist Scott Atran, in his book In Gods We Trust, puts it this way:
“In many, if not all, societies religious expressions of supernatural beings include monsters, that is, physically incongruous beings that counterfactually exaggerate or recompose human physiognomy, such as the pointed-ear Devil or the many-limbed Kali.”
One of the functions of religion, at least according to many writers, is to make the world meaningful to humans and to give their lives importance. The stories of a religious tradition are one way in which meaning and purpose is given to the world and the human actions within it. In his book Religion in an Age of Science, Ian Barbour writes:
“Unique to humans is the need to live in a meaningful world. We have said that myths or sacred stories are taken as manifesting some aspects of the cosmic order. They offer people a way of understanding themselves and of ordering their experience. They provide patterns for human actions and guidance for living in harmony with the cosmic order.”
The imagined fantasies of many mythological traditions, from modern Christianity to the polytheism of ancient Egypt and the coyote stories of North America’s Plains Indians, have helped to form cohesive societies. In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Harari writes:
“Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.”
Yuval Harari also writes:
“The ability to create an imagined reality out of words enabled large numbers of strangers to cooperate effectively.”
Worldview is shaped in part by the mythology—the collection of stories—in each culture. This mythology explains reality and helps interpret events, both social and natural. In their textbook Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, James Peoples and Garrick Bailey write:
“Worldview and myths affect people’s beliefs about how they ought to relate to the world and to one another, and therefore they affect how people behave in their everyday lives.”
Changing worldview and the behaviors which stem from it requires changing the stories, the mythologies, which are told, taught, and used to justify human actions.
Religion 101/102
Religion 101/102 is a series which explores many religious topics. The concept of religion in this series is not restricted to Christianity or to any of the god-based religions, but includes many non-Western and indigenous traditions. Religion 102 is a revision and expansion of an earlier essay. More from this series:
Religion 102: Agnosticism
Religion 102: Biblical Archaeology
Religion 101: The Meaning of Ghosts
Religion 101: Ancestor Worship in Ancient Europe and the Arctic
Religion 101: Ceremonial Human Sacrifice
Religion 201: Reincarnation
Religion 102: Naturalism
Religion 101: Religious Prophets